The
U.S. government's response to terrorism—its wholesale removal of data from
public Web sites—has a depressingly familiar ring to information professionals.
Consider this headline, "Washington Feeling Insecure About Non-Secret Information."
Sounds very similar to this one, "U.S. More Tightlipped Since Sept. 11,"
doesn't it? The first is from The New York Times and is dated August
30, 1987; the latter is an Associated Press release dated November 15,
2001.

In the rush to
secure the nation, government officials have once again looked to restricting
access to information as a cure-all. We have statements from them decrying
the availability of sensitive information and moaning that even pieces
of non-sensitive information, when put together from disparate sources,
could be transformed into sensitive data. In the 1980s, that went by the
Mosaic Theory moniker.

No one disagrees
that some information should remain secret, but many disagree that all
information has the potential of revealing secrets. Why such haste to remove
data from the Internet? Things have changed in the past decade. Information
is more obvious, more ubiquitous, and more of it is in electronic form.
In the late 1980s, those with access to electronic information numbered
in the thousands. Web technology has bumped that up to the millions. This
is no longer information for the elite; it's information for the masses.
Governments have a tendency towards distrusting the masses.

Information is
difficult to totally expunge from the Web, however. With the Wayback Machine,
Internet Archives, and cached pages, there's every possibility that data
taken down from primary Web pages still exists somewhere, carefully preserved
for whatever posterity it deserves.

Note too that information
extinction is not solely an online issue. Printed government reports are
being pulled from depository libraries. The indexes, whether in print or
online, that point to those reports are now inaccurate. It's the physical
equivalent of dead links. Not all information disappears because of censorship,
either. The U.S. Patent Office plans to discard older patents, digitizing
them for preservation. Patent researchers note that the marginalia will
be lost in the process and fear that computer access will not be as complete
as the present paper system.

It's understandable
that military Web sites, the Nuclear Regulatory Agency, and the Energy
Department were the first to remove information. Some have been reinstated.
Odd was the Federation of American Scientists, an organization dedicated
to unfettered access to information, which deleted data from its Web site.

More paradoxically,
as governments move towards information removal, the United Nations Economic
Commission for Europe has been encouraging greater rights of access to
environmental information. Known colloquially as the Aarhus Convention,
it entered into force on October 30, 2001. Among the signatories are countries
not traditionally known for championing the public's right to know, such
as Albania, Belarus, Romania, and Ukraine. Those favoring transparency
in government, notably Denmark, have also signed.

The argument between
information access and censorship is not new. The philosophical lines between
the two points of view are clear and have been for decades. This time around,
however, there's more information disappearing than ever before. Using
terrorism as an excuse to pull information that should be public is detrimental
to a democratic society and repugnant to online professionals.